Tracking the Artist with Arduino

Over the summer the Indianapolis Museum of Art "tracked" the artist living in the 100 Acres Art and Nature park. Transmitting geographic data in real time to the web provided many challenges and this how-to session will provide insight into how the IMA overcame those challenges.

To achieve our goal we developed a custom GPS tracker built on the open source hardware platform Arduino. Using this along side a GPS and cellular shield, a custom solution was created that sent the data over the existing cellular GSM network to the ima website. The data was plotted real time onto a slippy map utilizing a hex bin algorithm to plot areas of the park that the artist had traveled to the most. The map also plotted his most recent position giving visitors a chance to locate the artist and interact with him.